Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Dr Binoy Kampmark
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Starmer’s self-defence fudge: The UK’s growing involvement in the Iran War
Wars can distract, and for leaders in political purgatory, they can be particularly useful. It remains to be seen whether the UK’s increasing involvement in the illegal war being waged on Iran by Israel and the United States will serve that purpose. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, the great saviour…
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Loony bin rationales: The continuing war on Iran
Villainous lunacy is abundant these days as the bombing of Iran by Israel and the United States continues. The rationale for this illegal pre-emptive war that not only lacks legitimacy but should land its perpetrators in the docks of the International Criminal Court, continues to get increasingly muddled. With US…
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Going native in the Trump jungle: How it became legal to attack Iran
The allies of the United States have gone native, feral even, in the jungle of international relations planted by President Donald J. Trump. While we keep hearing about how awful Russia’s war against Ukraine is, with its shattering of international law and its dismissiveness of the provisions of the United…
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Roguish justifications: The apologists for the attack on Iran
February 28, 2026. Another attack, another breach of the United Nations Charter. A gross violation of international law. As usual, a violation celebrated as ethical, necessary, and high-minded in principle by the powerful who dictate such terms. Not squalid, dangerous, destabilising. Not, apparently, following the same pattern as before: interventions…
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Mendacious rationales: The lies behind Operation Lion’s Roar
Many in the United States would scarcely identify the difference between Iran and Iraq, both countries based on ancient civilisations so chronologically distant as to be fiction. If not Marvel, it’s not marvellous. But another fiction came into play towards the end of February as the United States and Israel…
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Biblical writ and Christian Zionism: Mike Huckabee, Tucker Carlson and Israel
It was good of Mike Huckabee, US ambassador to Israel, to come clean with the witchery and superstition that marks the Bible. When a text advocating genocide, ethnic cleansing and dubious real estate advice in the name of a vengeful Sky God becomes foreign policy and the sentiment of an…
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Punishing language: Queensland’s Antisemitism Bill
In a feat of enterprising delusion and sinister suppression, Australia’s second largest state has decided to deal with what it regards as an antisemitic problem. After last December’s attacks on Sydney’s Bondi Beach by two gunmen on attendees of a Hanukkah event that left 15 people dead, it has become…
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Not forgetting the victims: Club Epstein and crimes against humanity
With a sex trafficking, flesh peddling empire of favours, logistics and the good time to be had by the powerful, the gigantic scale of Jeffrey Epstein’s criminal network continues to disturb. The least savoury digital library on the planet, available through the offices of the US Justice Department as the…
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Objective fallacy: Eulogies on the passing of the law based international order
The eulogies are starting to wear thin. The lamented passing of the rules and law-based order only makes sense to those who believed that such rules and laws existed in the first place. How easy to forget that the spanning hegemon of each age always presumes that its laws and…
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Bad Beginnings: The End of New START
How awful could it get? The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) expired on February 5, terminating an era of arms control and imposed limits on lunatically contrived nuclear weapons programs of the United States and Russia. The New START Treaty entered into force on February 5, 2011 and…
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Mandelson: Trapped in the Epstein web
Jeffrey Epstein certainly got around. He moved virally, galloping through the cells of the establishment. What was more, he was permitted to. Dead and buried, the financier, convicted paedophile, sex trafficker, eugenics follower, and the man all in power would want to know, continues to ruin reputations, casting doubt on…
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Precarious invitations: Israel’s President Isaac Herzog’s visit to Australia
Things are getting rather ropey on the invitation of Israeli President Isaac Herzog to visit Australia on 8th February. It came amidst the anguish following the Bondi Beach attacks of 14th December 2025 on attendees of a Hanukkah event by two gunmen, leaving 15 dead. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese…
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Dooming the Chagos deal: The Diego Garcia dilemma
When remote islands start to interest chatterboxes in think tanks and bureaucrats in foreign ministries, we can only assume that some matters will be exaggerated over others. With the Chagos Islands, there is one matter that is hard to exaggerate. The plight of its indigenous population has been horrendous, treated…
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The preaching Pentecostal: Scott Morrison in Israel
Australia’s former Prime Minister and faithful Pentecostal Scott Morrison never passes up the chance to express an opinion if it will net him a reward. As one of various politicians of the right (and far rightist) hue invited by Israel’s Minister for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, Amichai Chikli, he…
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Dancing with European nationalism: Israel’s Generation Truth antisemitism conference
Held between 26th and 27th January at Jerusalem’s International Convention Center and called Generation Truth, the second international conference on combating antisemitism was a picture of cracking contradictions. Organised by Israel’s Minister for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, Amichai Chikli, it featured speakers from various far-right groups, many European, and…
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The gangster’s brief: The Barr Doctrine, Noriega and Maduro
US President Donald Trump might leave an impression of violent novelty, at least for the leader of a nominal liberal democracy, soiling international relations with the gangster’s touch. This sense of iconoclasm is misplaced. While his conduct regarding the abduction of Nicolás Maduro certainly dumps mightily on the precepts of…
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Artificial Intelligence, crime and prisons: Mahmood revisits the panopticon
When does the rot start in a politician? For some, it commences the moment election to office is confirmed. Others need to become cabinet ministers before being wholly blighted. UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood may provide a classic case study. Given that security matters fall within her purview, it was…
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Carney at Davos: Removing that sign in the window
“It seems that every day we’re reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry – that the rules-based order is fading, that the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.” These were the grave reflections of Canada’s Prime Minister, Mark…
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Gaza vanishing: Trump’s Board of Peace
Donald Trump’s Board of Peace overseeing the reconstruction of Gaza was always going to raise a host of niggling questions. From the outset, the US President made it clear he would be the helmsman of what was essentially an outfit of selected corporate overseers tilling the soil for The Donald’s…
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A cruel truce: Israel’s ongoing demolition of Gaza
What matters peace if it permits killing, maiming and destroying the infrastructure of a society supposedly once at war? This is the situation facing Gaza as the occupying Israeli forces go about their business making the Strip even more uninhabitable for the Palestinian residents, ensuring that that land will be…
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Festival of cowardice: The cancellation of Randa Abdel-Fattah
Boards of directors are a funny bunch. Often lacking expertise, claiming knowledge they do not have and insight that never illuminates, its members can make the cockup the stuff of legend. Instead of minding their own business and leaving the Adelaide Writers’ Week to take place without incident as part…
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Candid imperialism: Trump, racketeering and Venezuelan oil
It usually takes archival digging, the golden gaffe, an ill-considered remark and occasional spells of candour by those in power, to admit that the United States has, in common with other imperial powers, brutal ambitions. An example of the latter was General Smedley Butler who, at his death in 1940,…
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A shameful sham: The US Justice Department, fake cartels and Maduro
The Trump administration is increasingly resembling a government previously abominated by the current US president as entangling, bumbling, and prone to fantasies. President George W. Bush was well versed in baseless existential threats stemming from Mesopotamia, supposedly directed by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. There was a critical problem in…
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Confronting genocide with civil disobedience: The Pine Gap protests and Gaza
While the secret signals and surveillance facility at Pine Gap in Northern Australia, officially named the Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap (JDFPG) is billed as a joint affair between Australia and the United States, it is nothing of the sort. Just as offices direct the callow intern to make the…